One-animal books

It used to be that if you wanted to find that familiar diagram
of a bovine, carved up with dotted lines into "rump," "loin,"
"plate," "brisket", you'd find yourself heading back to the Joy of Cooking, which was
the last word in pretty much everything. Nowadays, the Joy of
Cooking--for all its many virtues--isn't the last word in anything,
and primal-cut books abound.

Although many of us are
fascinated by whole-animal, nose-to-tail preparation, not all that
many of us are actually doing it. Yet somehow the bar has
been raised, and knowing a good deal more detail about your meat
and where it comes from (and what does "round" mean anyway?) seems
to matter more than it did before.

Chickens, of course, have been commanding their own cookbooks
for decades. They've been evolving, though. The older
ones offer endless variations on what you can do with boneless
breast. The most recent ones start with incubating the egg,
and what sort of feed you should be using in your homemade chicken
coop.

Perhaps the clearest indication
that the single-animal cookbook has arrived is Goat: Meat, Milk,
Cheese, by mainstream cookbook team Mark Scarbrough and Bruce
Weinstein. And while many, including myself, may not have
access to goat meat or milk, it seemed perfectly natural for
somebody to devote an entire book to the subject.

How about you? What's your favorite animal, on the table
or in the book? And while we're at it, what's your favorite
way to serve it forth?

5 Comments

I know what you mean! The first year I went in on a beefer I took the heart and was totally at a loss. Same problem with lamb tongues and livers. (story here: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=96865367)

Harvestmoon, I sympathize. I'm getting my first chickens this year, and since they are probably going to get nicknames, they are probably not going to get eaten. And queezle-sister, I could not eat a half a cow head either! I'm an omnivore, not a hemi-bovo-cephalovore...!